


Another Autumn Follows Summer

by Jinxed_Ink



Series: Marks of a Life Well-Lived [2]
Category: Captive Prince - C. S. Pacat
Genre: Adult Nicaise, Bisexual Nicaise, Multi, Nicaise (Captive Prince) Lives
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-05
Updated: 2018-08-05
Packaged: 2019-06-22 08:06:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,200
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15577479
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jinxed_Ink/pseuds/Jinxed_Ink
Summary: “You don’t look fine,” Nicaise snaps. “How can you bear to be with him, if he makes you so unhappy?”“He does not,” Laurent says. He’s smiling, just a little, something wistful in the lines of his eyes. “But no marriage is ever effortless. There are always times when it’s easier to let things end, rather than hold on to them.”“I thought love was supposed to be simple,” Nicaise says. He feels lost, like a child in a starlit wood.“Oh, Nicaise,” Laurent says. His voice is gentle. “No one ever tells you this, but love is not a choice you get to only make once. You’ll have to keep choosing it, again and again and again, even when it’s painful, if you want it to survive. So long as it’s worth it.”





	Another Autumn Follows Summer

Nicaise’s first love affair is with a Veretian boy. 

He’s a few months older than Nicaise, yet the edges of him are still a little unformed with adolescence, where Nicaise already looks like a man. His hazel eyes are wide and warm, velvet-soft and his sand-colored hair never seems to quite lie flat at the back of his head, no matter how carefully he combs it. His upper lip is thin, but his lower lip is so full it looks like it’s been stung like a bee. 

None of these traits, taken alone, could be considered beautiful, yet their whole coalescences into something that Nicaise finds irresistible. 

The boy’s name is Aleaume. They meet when the intermingling courts are at Marlas, the place that is soon to be the capital of the New Artesian Empire. Aleaume and his friends come to the practice fields, to gawk at the wrestlers and whisper and snicker among themselves, but Aleaume keeps coming to watch them even once the novelty of the naked barbarians has worn off. 

He sits in the stands, weight braced on his arms in a casual sprawl, his gaze hot and intent on Nicaise’s back as he takes to the sawdust. They cross eyes, once in a while. Aleaume always looks away first, a blush coloring his freckled cheeks. 

It comes to a head after weeks of this, when Aleaume walks down to the arena just as Nicaise is leaving it, shoulders squared and a determined jut to his chin “Hello,” he says, in heavily accented Akielon. 

Nicaise is not sure why he’s surprised he’s being mistaken for an Akielon - here he is, after all, surrounded by the barbarians, sweat and sand clinging to him, and there’s plenty of Akielons who share is fairer coloring. The relief follows the surprise, sudden and bone-deep, that no one has connected the blue-eyed fighter in the kings’ retinue with the Regent’s pet. 

If they had, the gossip would have reached Aleaume by now. 

Aleaume, who has stopped, uncertain, his eyes a little too fixed on the jut of Nicaise’s collarbones, as though he both wants and doesn’t want to look lower and has only now realized that this, perhaps, was not the cleverest moment to make his approach.

Nicaise stares back at him, just as tongue-tied. He feels suddenly hyper-aware of his skin, of the droplets of sweat running down his back and chest and neck, his face too warm, his smile too wide.

Pallas, may the gods bless him, is the one who comes to his rescue. “He speaks your language,” he says to Aleaume, in his Veretian that remains thickly accented regardless of how much time he spends around Lazar. He claps Nicaise’s shoulder, gives him a little push, before leaving the arena.

Nicaise watches him go, a half-panicked, half-giddy lump in his throat. “Drink?” he offers, tentatively. 

They never make it past hungry kisses and roving hands. Almost a month into their affair, as they’re hesitatingly inching towards more, Nicaise surprises Alueame as he’s pushing another young man up against a wall, their mouths frantic as they move against one another.

***

“I still don’t see why you can’t have him executed,” he says, sullenly. His eyes feel swollen, his face crusty with dried tears.

Laurent raises his head, abandoning the grain report he’s perusing. “Because going behind your back, heinous as it may be, does not constitute treason.” 

Nicaise purses his lips, refusing to answer.

“Additionally,” Damianos says, from the back of the room, “I would say you’ve taken your revenge.” 

Stealing Alueame’s jacket to rub it all over a flea-ridden dog had felt good, as had been seeing Alueame and his new lover trying to surreptitiously scratch themselves during the solemn, dragging court functions. But whatever satisfaction he’d found had been short-lived. 

Aleaume and his new lover still had each other, while Nicaise had been left with nothing but a few flea-bites on his hands and wrists to show for his revenge. 

“Exiled from court?” he asks, hopefully.

Damianos sighs. “Your brother is a terror,” he says, to Laurent. To Nicaise, he adds, “The first love is always painful when it ends. But you’ll look back on your memories with him fondly, one day.” 

Nicaise settles for glaring at him, to dissimulate the little glow of pleasure he feels deep in his gut, when Damianos calls him Laurent’s brother and Laurent doesn’t correct him.

***

The first time Nicaise has sex - the first time it counts, by any reckoning he finds worthy - is also at the first games he attends as a participant rather than a spectator.

He’s nineteen, when Philias - the decrepit trainer who, if the whispers of the boys around the training yard are to be believed, has taught even Damianos’ father to wrestle - finally, begrudgingly, proclaims his form with the trident fine enough that he might participate in an official function. 

The contestants from Ios are used to him, by now, but the games are an important enough occasion that contenders flock in from the provinces. One of them, an hulking gladiator from Ishtima, looks him straight in the eye and spits on the ground.

Nicaise finds himself bristling.

“If you see Philias,” he tells Pallas, who’s hovering anxiously at his side, “distract him.”

Pallas stops him with a light touch on his wrist. “Promise me you won’t do anything foolish,” he pleads.

Nicaise just smiles at him, shaking off his hand. 

He’s at the tail end of a growth spurt, still slightly lanky with it, under strict orders not to wrestle anyone seriously until he relearns the balance of his body, to only focus on the trident, his primary discipline. Still, he makes his way over to the gladiator from Ishtima, stopping a few paces away to smile at him, hard-eyed. “Fancy a friendly bout?” 

It’s a mistake. 

His back hits the sawdust, quickly and with a force that makes his eyes water, a moment before the gladiator’s meaty arm finds his throat, pressing down violently. He’ll have bruises tomorrow, but for now he sucks in sharps breaths through his nose, stars dancing in front of his eyes. He’s panicking, terrified, arms flailing before his training wins over the fear. 

He counters the hold, throwing all his weight into it, all that new height he still hasn’t quite learned how to master, until their positions are reversed, his hands steady on the gladiator’s body, his legs planted on the man’s shoulders.

He keeps the position until the gladiator raises his hand and taps it three times, in quick succession, on the disturbed sawdust. The signal for surrender. 

“Good fight,” the gladiator says, once they’ve both caught their breath, and Nicaise is gingerly pressing his fingers against his tender throat. Surprisingly, the man’s words are not grudging. 

“My name’s Telegonus,” he says, sticking out his hand for Nicaise to shake. “From Ishtima.”

“Nicaise,” he replies, taking the proffered hand, his free hand still touching his throat. “From Ios,” he adds, surprising himself. Usually, he claims to hail from Marlas, so no one will think twice of his Veretian name and fair eyes. 

If Telegonos thinks them odd, he does not mention it. “Stop doing that,” he scolds, instead, taking Nicaise fingers in his to keep them away from his neck. His touch is warm, surprisingly gentle. “You’ll only aggravate it.” 

“Philias will have my head,” Nicaise admits, “if he finds out what happened.”

Telegonus whistles. “Philias’s your trainer? He came to Ishtima once. I still have nightmares of the commentary he gave me.”

Nicaise laughs. “You get used to it. Legends has it the greatest praise he ever gave was to king Damianos, and it was that his form was _passable_.” If the story’s true, at the very least, it would explain why the man’s so fond of Laurnent’s arch _adequates_ , Nicaise finds himself thinking. He smiles.

Telegonus smiles back. The expression makes his face look younger, somehow. Lighter. His features are rough-hewn, but pleasing, his mouth generous and his eyes dark and slanted. “How are you planning to keep him from finding out?” he asks, gesturing between them. 

Nicaise shrugs. “I’ll just tell him I fell.”

“On your neck?” 

“Why?” Nicaise asks. His smile comes slower, this time, more deliberate. “Are you planning on giving me a better excuse?”

The next day, when he appears for his match, Nicaise’s throat is purple with bruising, but so are his collarbones and his shoulders. There are scratch marks on his hips. He walks like he’s floating, a smile that he can’t quite suppress at his lips. 

Philias clucks his tongue when he sees him. “The gods spare me from adolescent boys,” he laments. “Of all the times for you to have discovered the pleasures of the flesh. I hope she didn’t give you the clap, at least. It would be no less than what you deserve, but we don’t have a month to lose to you bent in two with the pain in your testicles.” 

“It was a man, actually,” Nicaise says, his good humor still unshakable. 

Philias doesn’t look very reassured by this. “Then I hope he didn’t give you the clap. And that you didn’t do anything that could impact your performance today.”

“No, sir,” Nicaise, says, truthfully, suppressing an childish curl of amusement at use of the word _performance_. 

He wins at the trident, of course, and goes to the stands to watch Telegonus’ fight - short sword. He, too, sports a collection of love bites, though his complexion is dark enough to conceal most of them. Nicaise feels a sort of illicit thrill at watching him fight, at looking at the play of muscles and sinews under burnished skin - he knows this body, has felt it under his hands. 

Still, he keeps his expression passably neutral, standing a few paces from the emperors as he is, and all eyes are turned to the match, anyway. He’s reasonably certain no one would’ve noticed, had Lazar not decided to elbow him in side, _in the most conspicuous way possible_. “Is that your lover-boy?” he asks, loudly. “A little bird tells me you didn’t come back to your room last night.” 

Nicaise colors, as several heads turn to look at them. He kicks Lazar in the back of the knee, hard, where he knows it’ll hurt but do no lasting damage, enjoying, at least, the fleeting pleasure of seeing him buckle. Then, desperate to regain some of his composure, he turns to look at the emperors rather than at the arena. 

But of course, the gods know no mercy. 

“What is it with gladiators from Ishtima?" Laurent asks in a musing tone, slanting a sly-eyed look at his husband. "Perhaps I should sample one myself." 

Damianos chokes on his wine.

***

Nicaise’s first serious relationship starts to fall apart just as the emperors’ marriage does.

Gregor’s native to Marlas, the son of a merchant, not quite high-born, with a sweet smile and perpetual ink-stains on his fingers Nicaise finds endearing. His kisses taste of apricots. Their lovemaking is tender and a little awkward, nights spent pressed up against each other in Gregor’s narrow childhood bed, the thin blankets hauled up over their heads to create a cocoon for themselves. 

It’s wonderful and comfortable and warm and should be everything Nicaise has ever wanted. And yet, it is not. 

The first year, they are happy - then, the fight starts. The misunderstandings. The endless silences.

He’s so wrapped up in his own unhappiness that he barely notices the same thing happening to Damianos and Laurent, barely registers the hushed gossip sweeping though the court, until he invites himself to Laurent’s chambers, one day, and is confronted with the reality of it.

Laurent’s curled up on an armchair, arms wrapped around his knees. He’s not quite crying, but he’s getting there. He looks up when Nicaise enters the room, his eyes shining with unshed tears, his jaw shaking a little, his lips pressed together in a bloodless line. 

“Are you…” Nicaise asks, brought up short. “Are the two of you…” He doesn’t know how he plans on finishing that sentence- _Are you getting an annulment? What about the empire?_. All the questions that flit through his mind seem unspeakably callous, in the face of Laurent’s distress. 

“Fine,” Laurent replies, his lips trembling but his voice firm. “I’m fine. We’ll be fine.”

“You don’t look fine,” Nicaise snaps. “How can you bear to be with him, if he makes you so unhappy?” 

“He does not,” Laurent says. He’s smiling, just a little, something wistful in the lines of his eyes. “But no marriage is ever effortless. There are always times when it’s easier to let things end, rather than hold on to them.”

“I thought love was supposed to be simple,” Nicaise says. He feels lost, like a child in a starlit wood.

“Oh, Nicaise,” Laurent says. His voice is gentle. “No one ever tells you this, but love is not a choice you get to only make once. You’ll have to keep choosing it, again and again and again, even when it’s painful, if you want it to survive. So long as it’s worth it.” 

“How do you know, then? If it’s worth it?” 

Laurent inclines his head, pensive. “I know,” he says, slowly, “because any pain I feel now is like a candle to the sun, when compared to the happiness Damen gives me. And I know it’s the same for him.”

***

Nicaise watches, while his relationship with Gregor splinters and cracks, as Laurent and Damianos knit themselves back together. He watches the way Laurent leans over to whisper something in his husband’s ear, one night at dinner. Damianos throws his head back and laughs, too loudly, with surprise and relief.

A few days after that, he watches as Damianos puts his arm around Laurent’s waist as they walk through the gardens, his touch delicate, a little hesitant, as though Laurent is some wild, skittish bird that’d take flight at the slightest provocation. 

A month later, there’s a festival, for midwinter. Nicaise watches, still, from afar, as Laurent and Damianos dance across the hall. Their faces are turned together, bright, as though there’s a flame lit beneath their skin, firelight spilling forth from within. 

Something turns, unpleasantly, in his stomach. The next day, he ends things with Gregor. 

He feels both lighter and heavier for it.

***

He meets Deianira when he’s twenty-two, newly made an imperial guard. It’s summer, unreasonably hot even in Marlas, and the emperors have decamped the court at their summer palace for the worst weeks of the heat.

Nicaise, ostensibly, is on duty, but the atmosphere is relaxed enough that he spends much of his time on the beach, bare feet sinking into the warm sand, armor discarded a few feet away, ready to be put back on as soon as he’s due on rotation. 

She’s the daughter of the Kyros of Thrace. Nicaise has seen her before, once, when she’d been presented to the court at fourteen. She’d been a wren of a girl, lively but shy, half-hidden behind her sisters’ skirts; Nicaise had not spared a thought for her, then, and has not spared a thought for her since.

Five years on, the shyness has dissipated, leaving behind only the liveliness. She runs along the surf, one in a dozen of highborn Akielon maidens, naked to the waist, her skirts hiked up so she won’t be caught in them, spraying and screeching with a gaggle of children - her siblings, or maybe her cousins. 

Nicaise looks at her, her tousled curls cut along her chin, her strong jaw and delicate ankles, her thick-lashed black eyes and dark brows. She’s tanned all over, in the way of Akielons who’ve never had to know modesty at their nakedness. 

Desire is a surprise, when Nicaise didn’t think such things could ever surprise him again. As she leans back on her elbows, slick and dark on the rocks, her clothing sheer with water, spine arching, he finds he wants to run his fingers over the tendons in her legs, up and up and up. 

He spends a few days puzzling his approach. It will be different, he thinks, to court a woman, but he cannot quite place in which way it will be different, and he has no one to ask. The friends he’s made on the sawdust carry on as though they think they know how to talk to a woman, but Nicaise has seen enough of their approaches to know they’re severely deluded in this. The only person he’s reasonably close with, who’s ever successfully courted a woman, he realizes with a twist of his mouth, is Damianos. 

And even if Nicaise were desperate enough to go to him for advice, Damianos’s royalty, so his success hardly says much about his abilities - although, to be fair, he has managed to get Laurent into bed, so perhaps the man has some charms Nicaise has never been privy to. 

In the end, it doesn’t matter, as Deianira’s the one to approach him. 

They kiss for the first time in an alcove in the gardens, her mouth warm and wet against his. Her skin is soft, smooth as river-pebbles under his palms and he feels clumsy and awkward, unsure where to put his hands, her body foreign under his touch. 

She pushes away from him, slightly. “First time?” she asks, teasing but not mocking.

“With a woman, yes,” he admits. 

Her mouth twitches. “Come here,” she says, “and I’ll teach you.”

“I can’t get you pregnant,” he blurts, slightly panicked, as she puts her hand over his. “Laurent would have my head.”

“Well, good,” she says, laughing, bright-eyed, “I don’t want you to get me pregnant, either. I’ve things to do with my life.”

***

It’s a summer fling, all the sweeter for its briefness.

They lie together on Nicaise’s bed, a few days before parting, the sweat cooling on their skin, Deianira’s head tucked up against the hollow of his shoulder.

She’s chattering about her plans to join a diplomatic envoy to Vask, come fall. She has, not quite an intended, back in Thrace, but an understanding, and plans to be gone before their parents can negotiate further, so that her refusal not be seen as too great an offense. 

“Don’t you want to get married?” Nicaise asks. 

She pauses, turning her chin so that she can look at him, her eyes shining with good humor. “To Meleager? He has a weak chin and speaks of nothing but goats.” 

He laughs. “No. I meant in general.”

“Oh.” She slips away from him a little, bracing herself on her elbows, though she keeps their legs pressed together. “No, I don’t think so.” A pause. “Do you?”

Nicaise is silent for some time. He thinks of Deianira, running across the surf, muscles flickering under her skin, wild with the thoughtless grace of freedom. He thinks of sweet Gregor, who could never be all that Nicaise wanted. 

He thinks of Damianos and Laurent, standing more than a foot apart and yet with no daylight between them, looking at each other with bright gazes, choosing and choosing and choosing. 

“Yes,” he says, eventually. “I do.”

**Author's Note:**

> The title is from Heather Dale's song "choose".
> 
> I hope you liked the fic! If you did, please consider leaving a comment!
> 
> You can find this fic (and my other writing) also on my Tumblr, [here](https://thestoriesthatweweave.tumblr.com/post/176666311906/another-autumn-follows-summer).


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